17 Museums to Explore in Santa Clara County

This is a cultural institution serving children, families, and schools in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area. A member of the Association of Children's Museums and the Association of Science-Technology Centers, Children's Discovery Museum is located in downtown San Jose. The museum builds and displays interactive exhibits that responds to early childhood education.

The museum presents stories and artifacts of the information age and explores the computing revolution and its impact on society. The museum claims to house the largest and most significant collection of computing artifacts in the world. This includes many rare or one-of-a-kind objects such as a Cray-1 supercomputer as well as a Cray-2, Cray-3, the Utah teapot, the 1969 Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, an Apple I, and an example of the first generation of Google's racks of custom-designed web ser

The de Saisset Museum is the South Bay's free museum of art and history. The museum owns nearly 10,000 art pieces and historical artifacts, including the work of early Californian artist and university alumnus Ernest de Saisset and a considerable collection of California mission artifacts. Highlights of the de Saisset’s permanent collection include Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and 19th century prints by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, William Hogarth and so more.

This is a private museum where the company Hewlett-Packard was founded. It is located at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California. It is considered to be the "Birthplace of Silicon Valley". In the 1930s, Stanford University and its Dean of Engineering Frederick Terman began encouraging faculty and graduates to stay in the area instead of leaving California, and develop a high-tech region.

The Intel Museum introduces students to the world of micro-miniature computer chips, where millions of electronic components are packed onto quarter-inch squares of silicon, and time is measured in billionths of seconds. The museum is open weekdays and Saturdays except holidays. It is open to the public with free admission. The museum was started in the early 1980s as an internal project at Intel to record its history.

Art museum on the campus of Stanford University. The museum first opened in 1894 and now consists of over 130,000 square feet of exhibition space, including sculpture gardens. The museum is open to the public and charges no admission.

The Japanese American Museum of San Jose showcases a unique collection of permanent and rotating exhibits chronicling more than a century of Japanese American history. The farming project collected family histories, historical photographs, private memoirs and other unpublished documents and led to the development of a curriculum package on Japanese American history, which was adopted for use by the San Jose Unified and East Side Union High School Districts.

A majestic museum, that showcases the history of Los Altos and surrounding areas, including the transformation of the agricultural paradise once known as the "Valley of Heart's Delight" into the high-tech Silicon Valley. The museum features both a permanent exhibit as well as temporary exhibits.

New Almaden, is a historic community and former mercury mine in the Capitancillos Hills of San Jose, California. It presents visitors with an interesting array of exhibits about the history of mercury mining and the lifestyles of mining communities. A mine diorama duplicates the interior of a mine shaft, giving visitors a feel for working underground. Other exhibits explain the changing technology of how the liquid mercury was extracted from mined cinnabar ore.

New Museum Los Gatos is bringing art, innovation, history and Bay Area Stories to the wide audience of Silicon Valley. It contains 6 gallery spaces, 9 rotating exhibitions annually, an interactive, permanent Los Gatos History exhibit, as well as weekly workshops, youth programs, classes, and lectures. The 6,000 square foot building is located in the Los Gatos Civic Center at 106 E. Main Street.

Devoted to Ancient Egypt, it holds the largest collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities in the Western United States.

The San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles is an art museum in Downtown San Jose, California, USA. Founded in 1977, the museum is the first in the United States devoted solely to quilts and textiles as an art form. It include a permanent collection of over 1,000 quilts, garments and ethnic textiles, emphasizing artists of the 20th- and 21st-century, and a research library with over 500 books concerning the history and techniques of the craft.

The Sunnyvale Heritage Park Museum is a historical museum located in Sunnyvale. It was was dedicated and opened to the general public in September, 2008, as a testament to the history of Sunnyvale and the contributions made by the Martin Murphy family towards the founding of Sunnyvale.

The Museum of American Heritage is a museum in Palo Alto, California. It is dedicated to the preservation and display of electrical and mechanical technology and inventions from the 1750s through the 1950s. The museum has a large collection of artifacts that are generally not accessible to the public. Selections from the collection are displayed in a historic house at 351 Homer Ave, Palo Alto, California. MOAH is a 501 non profit organization and a member of the American Alliance of Museums.

The Tech Interactive is a family-friendly science and technology center in the heart of downtown San Jose. On the lower level there is a complex multi-story sculpture titled Origin, inside a 45-foot-tall cylindrical tower. The artwork portrays relationships among art, technology, and natural resources of the earth. Near the entrance to the building, there is Science on a Roll, a popular rolling ball sculpture by George Rhoads.

The Triton Museum of Art is a vital community resource that provides accessible exhibition and education programs, which promote a broad range of contemporary California art. It is the oldest non-university museum in Santa Clara County. The 22,000 square-foot space features high ceilings, pyramidal skylights and dramatic lighting. The spacious design of the building was created for versatile art presentation, as well as an aesthetically pleasing experience for the museum visitors.

A mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearm magnate William Wirt Winchester. It is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan. Since its construction in 1884, the property and mansion were claimed by many to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles.